New one

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Hey everybody :-),

I just finished my latest restore and wanted to show you.

Before:
After:

As a first step I simply used the healing brush to get rid of all the major blemishes.
But because I didn't want to replace everything (which would probably not even look very convincing), I decided to go on with dodging and burning from now on.
Basically what I did was create a new layer in "Soft Light" mode, filled with 50% gray and painted with white to lighten and black to darken certain areas in order to get the luminosity right.
If you're interested in what this might look like, see this screenshot here: .
The areas with color just indicate that I painted with color on the soft light layer to give those areas a little more color/saturation.
As a last step I merged all the visible layers and used the "Filter"-"Noise"-"Dust and Scratches" with a radius of 10 and a threshold of 4 to get rid of the little remaining blemishes. Because I didn't want to apply this globally I added a black layer mask and used a white brush to reveal it just where it needed to be revealed.

Fortunately there was not much color correction needed for this image ;-), but if you have any concerns still, they're very welcome :-)!

[kiska]

This should be bw. Did you do levels and curves? The top curves layer is to burn his eyes and his right eyebrow a little. This is just a quickie.

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Kiska, I new I had forgot something ;-).
Here's a new one with corrected levels and burned eyes & eyebrows:



Btw., so far when I got images in color I never changed them to bw, should I do this right of?

[kiska]

This was originally a bw that has yellowed with age. Do NOT change a "true" color photo to bw. The really old photos that have turned to a pleasant sepia can stay sepia. This looks like the 50's maybe. Not what I would consider "really old".

[Mhayes]

Jonas,

All of the photos will technically be in color, because they were shot by the camera in RGB. That is also the color mode that we want the final version to be uploaded back at. However, if you know that your photo is B/W and you would want to change it to that while you work and it became a grayscale image; you would have to change the color profile back to RGB before uploading . It is really better to stay in RGB color mode even when you want a B/W. The reason being that each of the three channels effects the tonal range. A good way to go B/W, but still in RGB mode is to use the Channel Mixer Adjustment or Calculations. Plus, as an adjustment layer will allow you to tweak later if you want to make some changes.

I agree with Kiska about the old photos taking a sepia color and especially the 50's comment.  ;)

Margie